85: Most Common Remediation Mistakes

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr, and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

Hey, everyone, what's going on today? I want to talk about remediation today and specifically some of the mistakes that I see. And I want to tie it back to a couple different projects that I've worked on, which kind of helps to illustrate how these, how these mistakes, how these things that get overlooked in remediation can result in a lot of lost money and a lot of lost time and ultimately, like remediations that don't work, you know, and one thing I say all the time, I say remediation works. It's bad remediation that doesn't work. And so if you do remediation the right way, it works. I've seen it happen time and time again. The problem is that most remediators out there, they don't do it right. They skip steps, they shortcut things, they don't do things as thoroughly as they should. And as a result, you end up with a poor remediation. You don't know any better. Right. You got professionals going in there. They're doing what they're, what they say that they're doing. Maybe they show you pictures. You know what's cool? They show you pictures. Awesome. Do you really know what you're looking for? Not really. So when they tell you, yeah, here's the pictures, look, it looks great, you say, okay, it looks great, right? And so, so I want to talk through, like some of that stuff. So I'm going to start with the story from one of my clients and, and use that kind of as like a springboard for talking about some of these remediation mistakes that we see happen a lot. And just so you know, some of these things that I'm going to be referencing are in a document that we created called 10 Most Common Remediation Mistakes. If you go to remediationmistakes.com I put it up there. You could just enter your email address and get it. This is a, I don't know, like a four or five page PDF here that's basically breaking down why remediation doesn't work. And then these 10 most like, common issues that I see, which are the reasons that it doesn't work. And a little bit more info in there talking about how air moves through your environment and how we have to address everything holistically. So it's a pretty cool document. Took us a couple weeks to put it together. And it's worth a check if you haven't looked at it already. So it's remediationmistakes.com and you can check that out.

So I had this client, and we go to their place, and I always do this history gathering. I always tell you guys this. I always ask a lot of questions before we get in. So one thing that I found out is that they had a bathroom area that was previously remediated before we came, Right. It was done, I don't know, like a year ago or months ago or something. I forget exactly how long ago, but it was done before we got there. Okay. So when I'm doing these. These history gathering calls, a couple things I always ask for. I asked for one, you know, from. From a health perspective, just give me a top line. What's going on? Right? Like. Like, why were you reaching out to us? What's the concern? Helps me understand how deep we need to go in terms of, like, the panel of testing that we're looking at. So that's one. The second thing I ask. Any previous water issues that you know about, have you had a leak from somewhere? You know, tell me that. Right? If you know you have a. You've had a water leak, then we know around 80% of the time there's a mole problem behind that water leak, even if it's something that happened a long time ago, even if you fix the leak, but you never remediate it. Okay, so basically, question two is, do you have. Have you had previous water events, water issues that really haven't been remediated? Right, because that's important to know. The third piece is, have you had remediation in places prior to us being here? And if so, where are they now? The reason I asked that question, you might be saying, well, Brian, we had it remediated. What do you care? It's been remediated. The reason that I'm asking is because there are some pretty common mistakes that happen in remediation. And in turn, what happens after that is that the mold isn't actually removed from the space. And so you paid all this money for remediation. They put the wall back together, they painted everything. It all looks nice and pretty. You spent, you know, five, ten grand to get it done, whatever it was, and now you think, all right, there's no more mold over here. I'm good over here. There's still a mole problem in my house. I didn't. Ermie, My doctor's telling me whatever it is. So now I got to find out wherever it is. But I know it's not here because this was remediated. Well, the only way that you could really know if it was not there is if you did proper post remediation testing. And so let's start there. So post remediation testing, basically what it means is after an area was remediated, you have to test the area to make sure that the mold's actually gone. Novel concept, right? Remember, guys, we're dealing with microscopic organisms that you cannot see. So you can't just look at something and say, yep, all the mold's gone. Because that doesn't work. Our eyes don't work that way. And if any remediator tells you that their eyes work that way, and that means they're like the Six Million Dollar Man. They're a superhero. They're cyborg. It's amazing. Why are they doing remediation? They should be saving the world, doing other things. So it doesn't exist. Right? And so you can't just rely on that. So then the big thing that a lot of times people will. Remediators will do is they'll say, well, we're just going to do an air test in here. And if the air test shows that there's no mold, then it's fine. We did our job. Right? Here's the problem, though, guys. The mold wasn't growing in the air.

Think about that. You hire somebody to come in to remove mold that. Let's say. Let's say you're in a bathroom and there's a mold problem in a wall. You didn't even see mold on the surface of the wall. Let's say there was water damage on the wall. We tested behind the wall, we found there was mold, okay? So their job is to come in and get rid of the mold. A remediators job is to remove the mold growth, okay? That's their job. It's not just to clean the air. That's not remediation. Remediation is actually removing the growth. Removing the mold impact. That's what it's doing, okay? And so if. If there's, you know, if you're only doing air testing as part of post remediation, you know, validating that it worked, then you're not actually testing what they were tasked to do. Does that make sense? You're testing the air. Big deal. The air better be clean because they're running air scrubbers and they're. And they're in this contained space. They're cleaning the air non stop in there. If the air isn't clean, like holy crap, there's a big problem, right? The air is most times going to be clean. That doesn't mean that the surfaces are. And this is where we start getting into some of the mistakes that happen. So the second piece of post remediation testing is that you have to surface test the areas that were remediated. So again, let's say that you had a wall that had a mold problem. Let's just say we removed the entire wall, the full length of the wall from floor to ceiling. That's what was done. You have all of your, your framing, right? The 2x4s that go behind the drywall, all of that framing is now exposed. So part of what they need to do is that they need to actually clean those surfaces. They need to get the mold growth out of the wood components. Right? The mold wasn't only growing in the drywall, the mold grows in the wood. Additionally, there's a bunch of debris and just crap that's behind your walls. If they're not cleaning and getting all of the construction debris and the insulation fragments and the crumbs and stuff from the drywall that get created and all this stuff, if that isn't gone, then mold is going to remain because it harbors and it collects in there. So there's different things they have to do. From a surface perspective, when you think of the surface almost, there's almost two things they're doing. One, they're removing the structural growth or the growth out of the structural components, I should say. So this is like the framing pieces. If there was mold growing in the framing or anything like that, they're pulling that out. And then the second thing they're doing is that they're surface cleaning all of the dust and byproduct and construction debris and drywall fragments and all, and the insulation and everything. They got to get all that out of there too, which is also a level of surface cleaning. It's just not, it's not, it's not removing out of structural components. It's kind of all the stuff that settled on the surfaces afterwards that they have to get out. They got to clean all that stuff too. And if they don't, you're going to end up with either. With two things. One, they never actually remove the mold growth from your framing which means you're going to put your wall back together and you're still going to have mold that's actually embedded in the, in the structural components behind the wall. Problem or two, they just kind of like sand down or wire brush the framing. Or maybe they don't even do that. Maybe they just go in and spray everything, which is what a lot of them do. They get some like, high powered spraying device with some magic solution that's supposed to kill everything and they spray everything and then they just put it all back together and they leave all the crap and the debris and everything behind. They put the wall back up. Guess up, guess what? The mold is still back there. And all the debris, it's still in the framing and the structural components. Okay? So if they're doing that, it's a problem. All right, so now let's go back to where the story started. So I had a client, they had a wall remediated in a bathroom. Happened this way. There was no post testing afterwards. Okay. They took the word of the remediation company that it was fine. All right? And it was like, here, here's some pictures. Everything's good. Look, we painted it all white. So it looks great. Like, whatever, cool. You painted it awesome. That means absolutely nothing. So. And then they put the wall back together, right? So I asked this client, I'm like, hey, tell me, you know, have you had any previous remediation? They tell me about this bathroom. I'm like, okay, I want to test the wall in this bathroom. And they're like, why do you. Why we had it remediated? And I explained to them some of the things I just laid out. I'm like, listen, guys, if your goal in hiring me is to figure out all the potential areas where there could be a mold issue going on so you understand how to handle them properly and what needs to or needs not to be remediated? And you don't have proper post testing on these remediated spaces, then we have to test it to, to rule it out. So if they had post testing, that was done properly. If they had surface testing. So when I say surface, basically you're doing like a surface swab across all the framing that was remediated. You're kind of rubbing the swab over all of it. You're doing a composite collection of all those areas. And they did an error test and both of those things came back and everything looked good then. Cool. I wouldn't retest it or I wouldn't suggest it, but in their case there was no post testing. I don't trust local remediators because I know most of them don't know what they're doing.

And so I said, okay, we need to test this. And so they agreed. And I did a wall cavity in that wall. Okay? So the wall was built back together. It was beautiful. It was painted. Everything was great. It was a brand new piece of drywall that was up for only a few months, right? So I put a little hole in the wall like we do, put a tube through the hole, tested behind the wall, and I had them point out to me, where was it worst, right? Because, you know, when everything's fixed, I can't see anymore, right? So I was like, hey, where was the damage? Where was it worse? And so they told me where it was. And so we did the test there. Guess what came back? We found a good amount of stachybotrys behind that wall, which is what's known as the black toxic mold. Okay. It was behind this wall that was remediated probably six months before we got there. And the wall was a brand new piece of drywall, painted great baseboard crown molding. Looks amazing, wonderful, beautiful. The paint color was fantastic. It was this really cool blue color that looked wonderful. And guess what? There's black mold behind the wall. And. And why is it back there? Because it was remediated previously, and then it actually wasn't remediated properly. And there was no checks and balances in terms of the post remediation testing and inspection to make sure that it was actually done. So when you contract a remediation company to come out and you say, hey, your job is to remove the mold that's behind this wall or that's in this wall and in this area. And their scope of work is to remove that, and then they take off the piece of drywall and basically don't clean anything behind it. And then they charge you a bunch of money and. And then tell you, okay, cool, you could put your drywall back up. I mean, honestly, guys, you could have ripped your own drywall out for that, let's be honest, right? And not actually clean anything the right way. Lord knows if they were containing everything properly, who knows, right? They're not cleaning it. Who knows what they're doing? And so. And so now you've paid for this. And now they're not being held liable or accountable for it. I don't even say liable because it's not like a legal thing, but they're not being held accountable for it. One way to address this I have another podcast episode earlier in the feed here about pre.

Remediation, Pre coordination calls. Basically everything you should talk about with your remediation company prior to them actually starting the job. One is that you have to do post testing, and the post testing has to include surface samples. And if they don't, and they're not open to doing that because, hey, guess what, guys? Surface samples actually show problems when they're there. A lot of remediators don't want to mess with that. They just want to come in and out, right? They're just trying to get in and out as fast as they can. That's the. That's what they do for work, right? They. It's like. Like volume. They don't care how effective they're being. They're told by their franchise managers, if you spray this magic stuff everywhere and you could get in and out of a project in a day, then we can handle multiple projects in a month, and we can make a whole lot of money. And that's what the goal is, right? And the people that are doing the work, like the field remediation workers, the day workers, they don't know any better. They're not doing the research on how all this stuff works. They're doing whatever their boss tells them. They're doing whatever their. Their process includes in their company. Their process is built by people who are. Most times, I'm gonna say every remediation company, but most of them, it's, hey, somebody told us this. This solution kills everything. So we're just gonna spray the solution everywhere. We're gonna build this containment. We're gonna put in an air scrubber for two days, and this is how you do remediation. And done and done and done. And now we're gonna focus on marketing and how do we do this? So we're gonna do a lot on HomeAdvisor and a lot on Yelp, and we're gonna. And do promos and discounts and things to get people to want to come with us, because, honestly, we could do promos and discounts because our process is not really that expensive, Although we charge a crapload of money for it. It doesn't take a lot of time. I'm just spraying something on framing, so that's not super expensive. So I'm down with offering discounts because we have such a high profit margin that who cares? So we'll offer discounts. We'll get in. We'll do. We need to do. We'll do as many jobs as we can. And look we built a thriving business. And I think I just described servpro. And so there you go. Right. And.

That'S it. Right. And listen, I don't know the ins and outs of CertPro and all these other franchise types of remediation companies, but I'll tell you what, everyone that I go into, probably 90% of them fail honestly. So whatever they're doing is not working. So that's the thing. So this is why I test previously remediated areas. If they weren't properly remediated and or weren't post tested properly, we have to check them out. If I didn't do this in this situation, then we would have gone through, done some other things in the house and.

Maybe found some sources. We did find some other things. We would have remediated that stuff. Client would have thought there was nothing else going on. They still would have an exposure source in the house that they didn't know about. And maybe the full house cleaning isn't happening as well as we want it to. And why isn't it working? It's because there's another source somewhere, that's why it's not working. And so that's one example. Okay, I'm going to give you one more example. I had a client, bigger project. There was a lot of failures in this one. And this was a company, a remediation company that came out. We got into a fight on the phone while the client was on the phone about how bad this was. And I go in. Basically we had remediation in most rooms of their house. So there's a big project. They were out of the house. Everything was moved out of the house. A bunch of different containments built up. Different bathrooms, different bedrooms, different things. The kitchen was basically gutted. Two of the bathrooms were gutted. Some of the bedrooms had multiple walls that had to come out. Attic had to be redone, crawl space. There's a lot going on. Right. And so a couple things that I saw here. So one, let's just go back to what we talked about. So their deal was they come in, they remove the building material and then they have a fog that kills everything. Magic fog. They actually charge extra for the magic fog. I don't even know what they call it. I call it magic because actually it was magic. It would work.

Side note, talking about magic, you know, I'll say this for Parent corner at the end. So they sell the client on this magic product. It costs more money than a normal product. They fog the whole house with it and it makes everything so much easier. It saves on time, it saves on labor, it saves on cost. Guess what happened When I walked into the house, I literally saw mold on so much framing. Just black wasn't even like weird colors that you might like, maybe not think is mold. It was literally black covering framing pieces in multiple rooms. A bunch of pieces of drywall, you know, dust and debris, like broken drywall pieces. There's just like dirt and dust and crap everywhere. All of that collects all the particles, it's all still there. I walked in, I did a quick walk around the whole place, walked right back out and said, they are going to fail 100%. Do you think that they will come back and redo this the way that I talked about it? Or do we need to test everything to prove that they didn't do it? And they were like, well, they think that they did everything right. And they told me about this product and it does everything and blah, blah, blah, blah. I was like, alright guys, you got two options. You want to take their word for it or you can look at these pictures I just took and you can see all the mold everywhere. And if you want them to come back in because you invested in this company to come and do this stuff and you got sold, you know, snake oil, then I need to prove that none of it worked. And if I need to prove none of it worked, I have to go through and test every room and show everything that's going on and show that none of it worked anywhere. Right? So that's what we ended up doing. They spent a bunch more testing on post testing, right? Cha ching, right? Extra money from a poor remediation. First you have to retest it and try to prove to them that they failed. Because they're going to come back and they're going to say, no, we didn't fail, everything's great. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Brian's ridiculous. Everyone knows that Brian's over the top. Nobody wants to work with Brian because he's so hard to work with, blah, blah, blah. And you know what guys? You want to know why I'm hard to work with? Because I actually want stuff done right. Sorry. I actually care about my client's health and I actually fight for them. And if that makes me a pain in the ass to work with and so be it. Whatever. I have this reputation around LA of being this guy that nobody wants to work with as far as remediators go because they don't want to deal with my process and my protocols and Everything. And that's fine, actually. Makes me feel good, to be honest with you. So we go back in, we retest everything. They spend a few thousand dollars on retesting, Just surface testing, different things. We didn't even get into the mycotoxin testing and the ERMI testing, all this stuff. I literally just did air tests and surface tests in different areas of the house. Almost every surface test failed. Most of the air tests were okay, right? And this is what happens in these types of scenarios, although a couple of them were not, but most of them were. So then I get on, I show them, the report goes back. It's all these things fail. There's mold growth literally everywhere. And then there comes a phone call with me and the client, the remediator and attorney's big, contentious phone call and the remediators. Like, obviously, everyone knows that surface testing doesn't work. Like. And then he starts going to talk about something else. Like, he was just dropping a fact and continuing. I'm like, whoa, wait a second. What the hell are you talking about? Everyone knows the surface testing doesn't work. Where the hell is that coming from? Right? He was trying to write. He was trying to dismiss the type of testing and devalue the fact that. That if you do a surface test on something and it comes back and there's something there, then that means that there's a problem. And he was trying to only say the air tests are the only thing that matters, and everyone knows that that's all that matters. And, ugh, it was so freaking frustrating. It was annoying, right? And I know what I'm talking about when I'm talking to this guy, and it was annoying. Imagine if it was you talking to this guy. You don't know any better. I mean, maybe you know better because you're listening to me a lot, hopefully. And if this is your first episode, maybe go listen to more. Some more stuff if you like what you're hearing. But this is what happened. And then they ended up, like, they had to fight them because they, like, you know, in their. In their contract, there's something about, like, some sort of guarantee of their work or whatever. So they come back in and, like, we're showing it's not. So then they bring someone else in and they just do air tests, and all their tests say that everything is fine. And so they're saying, well, well, all of our stuff shows that it's fine. So, no, you can't enact this part of the contract. Contract, because we had someone come and test and Say it's fine. Does this sound familiar? Does this sound like a landlord that's trying to cover up problems in the house because they don't want to spend any money? Because that's exactly what it freaking sounds like to me. And they actually have this whole thing in play for when they do projects. It's like going to a litigation case now. It's like you're going to court and trying to prove this to them. It's so frustrating. So one of the things that has to be in contracts is what post testing looks like and who is interpreting it. So there needs to be surface testing included. The interpretation of the test results cannot be on the remediator or it can't be on them to. It has to be on a third party, right? It has to be on a separate inspector that they're not. That they don't hire. That's to come in and say that everything looks good. That has to be part of the contract. If it's not, you're just setting yourself up to get screwed like these people did, right? And so that's what happened. Long story short, we got into a couple, like big fights on the phone. And at one point I just said to the client, like, the clients weren't really saying anything. And after the second phone call, where this is getting like this, I was like, stop, I'm done talking to you. That's it. I've made my point. You've made your point. Whatever it is, clients, this is up to you now. This isn't back and forth with us trying to fight. The clients were really wanting the remediator to be right because it was cheaper to do it that way. And they were really wanting him to be right. Yet they told me that they trusted me. If you really trusted me and you brought me in to do it in the first place, and I'm telling you that everything is, is not right. And I'm showing you testing is validating it. Why are we going back on the phone back and forth with this remediator, with them trying to make their case that it's okay, it's because you don't actually trust me, or you're just trying to hope that I will give or that I will cave and say, ah, you know what? In this case it's okay, you guys could do it. They were like looking for permission for me to say that it was okay for everything to have failed and then not to remove any of the mole growth. Anyway, sorry, guys, I'm not going to do that. I'm Never going to do that. I'm never, ever going to do that. I can't say something that I know that isn't true just to make a client feel okay with a poor decision that they made. Because they're going to move back in, they've spent all this money, they're going to be sick again. And then you know what's going to happen down the road? They're going to come back and say, brian, you said this is okay, but I'm sick again. I'm guarantee you that's what would happen. So I can't do that. Right? I can't do it. I wouldn't do it for my clients. I won't do it for you guys. I'm not going to tell you that it's okay to do stuff and shortcut it like that, because it's not okay. All right, so those were a couple stories. So I'm going to read you a couple of the items in the document that I mentioned at the top, which is again, you can get it remediationmistakes.com these are 10 most common remediation mistakes that I see. Okay, so I'm going to go with number.

Number three on the list. Not drying wet building materials before you remediate. Okay, so if you have a water intrusion that's coming in, that means that, you know, the drywall might have gotten wet, the framing might have gotten wet, maybe the flooring has gotten wet and there's moisture there. So you have to moisture map all this stuff and figure out if there's moisture. And the remediators need to come in and they actually need to dehumidify all of the building components in the, in the structural or in the containment area. Right. And if they don't do that, then if moisture is still in the building materials, they could sand and wire, brush and clean and vacuum all day. But if they didn't pour the moisture out, mold is going to come back. So that's. That's number three on the list. Okay, so let's, let's go to number.

I'm trying to, like, hand pick a couple one of these things. Let's do number six. This is what I talked about a lot. I'm going to read this. Here it goes. Not removing mold from surfaces. Number six. This may be the biggest mistake we see. Simply removing drywall and or spraying exposed framing is wrong. Your remediators contracted to remove mold growth. This means they need to abrasively remove mold that has grown into building materials by sanding or wire brushing. If they don't, they didn't actually remediate anything, and then there will still be plenty of mold left behind. Okay, so that is number six on this list. Okay, so I'm going to look at one more of these on this list and read this for you. Let me see. We talked about kind of wet building materials. Let's talk about number nine, encapsulating over debris. Okay, so remember I talked about, like construction debris and drywall pieces and stuff that get left behind. So they're not cleaning the tame it properly, which is one of the other numbers up here. They have to clean all that stuff out. But if you don't clean it out, right, and then they're just spraying and encapsulate over stuff, it's a problem. So the first thing I say is first, there shouldn't be any debris. See, mistake number five. So number five, which I said is talking about debris. Okay. All right, so now here's the next piece. Encapsulating over debris limits its effectiveness. Again, if there is debris, then there's a good chance that there is still mold byproducts in the area. Okay, so you're not, you're, you're not creating kind of the seal between the encapsulate and the building material. If there's a bunch of debris that's left there. And two, if there's mold on that debris, then you're kind of just trapping that in there. And then once the, once the encapsulate starts to break down or in the areas where the debris exists, it's not going to get a full hold, then there's going to be pathways for that stuff to get out. All right, so that's number nine, encapsulating over debris. Okay, so I just read you three of these. All right? There's 10 of them. So if you guys are in a spot where remediation is about to happen and you're thinking about it, I would definitely go download this, this document. It's free. You literally said, put in your email address and I will send it to you.

And it's that easy. Okay. And then past this, I. I kind of talk bigger picture. Why all these things, why these 10 mistakes are in play. I talk about the three levels of the indoor environment, how they all interact with each other, which is very important. I talk about the analogy I give all the time where mold is like a factory. I actually break that down in here, what that actually means. I talk about how our remediation protocols were actually developed over the course of two Years and the amount of money that got invested into them to make sure they work properly, which was like $3 million, guys. $3 million of combined client remediation budgets all put together over the course of two years to actually figure out how to do this stuff the right way. Okay, so this isn't me just sitting here ranting and complaining. I invest a lot of money into this stuff. Or we, I should say we and my clients. I did not invest the $3 million, but we went out, we did testing, we did other things. So we had an investment too in that point and all trying to figure it out. It was like teamwork between us and our clients are trying to put it all together. And so all of that has happened. Right. And so I'm going to read you this clip about that, about that. That process is two years and $3 million later, it hit us like a ton of bricks, like a message from the gods. A moment of clarity. Mycotoxins are chemicals and they're not your run of the mill particles. So we need to treat them like chemicals. It all came together pretty quickly. After that. We started researching chemical residue cleaning protocols. We incorporated them into our process that we had developed up to that, that point. And all of a sudden the success of rates skyrocket or the success rates skyrocketed. With a few more tuks, we finalized a mycotoxin cleaning protocol that actually works. Okay, so that's the quick summary of what's going on there. And that's where all of this kind of leads to, is understanding how to remove stuff properly to get into the second phase of cleaning. So guys, if you're doing remediation, this download is a must for you. It's called 10 Most Common Remediation Mistakes. You could get it at remediationmistakes.com I hope. A couple of the stories that I just shared with you about previous clients and what they did and how I found problems in different post remediation situations help you understand that you can't just call some remediator in and take their word for everything. Because honestly guys, you can't see this stuff most times. And then in the case of my second example, you could see it everywhere. So I don't care what magic potion you're spraying all over the house, which is what they did. When you test the surfaces, all the crap was still there. Magic, massive failure. Oh, and by the way, that client spent probably close to $20,000 for them to knock down a bunch of walls and spray magic spray everywhere. So guys, I don't want you to make that mistake. I want you guys to do it the right way the first time. Go check out remediationmistakes.com that'll help you kind of handle the remediation piece. In addition to that, we're working on a little revamp of the Mole Finders method webinar. It's currently down right now. It'll probably down for another week or so. So. And then we're gonna set it up to where it will actually be available on demand, anytime that you want to see it. So I know one of the problems, one of the problems, just one of the struggles in life is that we're not always around when something is scheduled. You know, you got kids, you got work, you got other stuff. And I was doing the webinar once every two weeks. I was doing it live. And I was, you know, I couldn't do it multiple times if you couldn't show up. You know, we sent out replay links, but at the end of the day, sometimes it's just nice to be able to see something when you want to see it. So what I did is I took the best, what I thought was the best webinar that I had done because we had done multiple of them. I took it and we were, you know, we recorded all of them. So we put it into kind of an on demand set. You could either watch it immediately, you could schedule yourself to watch it any day for a couple days in advance. You could pick the time that you want to watch it in two hour increments. So 2 o', clock, 4 o', clock, 6 o', clock, whenever it makes sense for you to watch it, whatever day it makes sense for you to watch it. If you, when you get there and you want to watch it right now, perfect. Just click on I want to watch it right now and you can watch it. Okay. And the reason that I did it this way is because I just talked about remediation here, right? Remediation is important, but you got to find the problems first. And if you're not finding them properly, then remediation is not going to work because you don't know where they are. And so that's another big problem that happens. So this webinar is all about how to find the hidden wall. This making you sick. It's about an hour and maybe like 40ish minutes of just a free sort of training education piece talking about core concepts of how air moves through houses, how inspectors aren't necessarily doing things the right way, examples of how I found things for clients and the process that we use, I actually even show some of the process that we use. We talk about remediation a little more. And then at the end, we created a program. It's called Molefinder's method. That's why the website's molefindersmethod.com so after this completely free webinar that you could just watch and turn off if you want to afterwards, I also, we created this product for you guys to help you find this stuff on your own. So there's a platform and a program, and so many people are using it right now, the feedback is amazing. I'm getting texts from people telling me, you know, I found 15 areas in my house that I didn't even know existed just from going through your training and just doing what you're telling me to do. Right. I had someone else, and they said, hey, I learned more looking at this than I have in two years of trying to figure it out by myself. Thank you so much for putting this together. Right. So this program, I literally sat down for a year and mapped out exactly how I go through a house, and I put all the rooms into specific categories. So there's only really nine types of rooms that you'll ever encounter in your house. It makes it a lot easier to then break down that type of room to know how to look for it. I tell you exactly where to look in that room. I tell you exactly what to look for in that room. I tell you exactly how testing should happen. I give you access to.

You know, if you get into it. I give you access if you would like, to learn how to interpret the lab results so you actually know what they mean. I give you all of our remediation protocols. So I just talked to you about remediation for about 25 minutes here, actually give you the exact protocols that we talked about. So when I talked about two years, $3 million took us all this time to build this remediation plan. I literally give that to you in this program.

And there's a lot of other stuff that's included. Yes, it's a program. You enroll in it. Right. There's a cost for it. Of course there is. There's a cost for hiring an inspector to come to your house. The reality is, though, a random inspector, a local inspector, comes to your house. If you've been listening to me for any period of time, you understand where the pitfalls are in that if you want to find where the hidden mold is hiding, you want to do it the right way. You want to do it the way that I do it in every house that I go to. That's what Mold Finder's method is all about. I basically wanted to make it accessible to anybody at any time. And by changing the webinar from a live webinar to a pre recorded webinar, that was what I thought one of the best ones that I had done. I'm giving you guys the ability to kind of watch it at your own leisure and be able to take it in and not feel kind of trapped to having watched it at a certain time. And if you miss it, then it's like, oh, I missed the webinar. What do I do? I can't tell you when people text and DM me like, oh, we missed the webinar. Is there a replay? Can we find it? How do we get it? I want to watch it, guys. I get it. Life happens, right? And so that's what this is. We're doing a revamp right now. It's not currently live. We're probably going to relaunch it in about a week or so. So you can take a look back. It's a whole new look, whole new feel. If you've been to the page before, the look and feel will be different. If you've watched the webinar already, it's going to be the same webinar that you've seen before. So there's not going to be any, like new changes or anything in that. In terms of the content, I may have delivered it a little differently, but the outline of the content is the same. It's just for those who haven't seen it, it's just a way for you guys to get kind of make it more flexible to your lives, right? And so that's the deal. So I just wanted to share that with you. That's molefindersmethod.com Like I said, check back about a week, week or so, it should be ready to go. And then the last thing, I'm gonna end with another Parent Corner. So I did Parent Corner for the first time, which, by the way, I'm always gonna, I don't know if I'm always gonna say it. I stole this segment for one of my favorite podcasts, the Bill Simmons show. And they do Parent Corner and they talk about sports and like pop culture, and then they just start talking about their kids and like, just ridiculous things that are happening. So I thought it was kind of funny. And so I'm going to do Parent Corner. The last Parent Corner I was Talking about how my daughter, we were sending her to kind of like toddler daycare preschool for the first time and how she just was like, not happy that we were sending her there. I was like, freaked out about it. I got a lot of, like, encouraging texts and DMs from you other parents out there telling me that it'll pass. You know what? It passed in like three days. All of a sudden she's like, like on a weekend, if she's not going to school, school. Now she's like, upset that she's not going to school. I almost feel like, because we've introduced her to other kids on a regular basis and cool. Like arts and crafts, things that we had never really done. We did other things, but like these kind of fun projects that we hadn't done here.

Partially, I guess, because I just didn't know about it. I'm not like, I don't know. I don't know if that makes me a bad parent or not. Probably I'm going to say no. I'm just going to say that there's a reason that teachers exist and there's a reason that these programs exist. They know how to. How to do things that stimulate our kids and get them excited about stuff. So anyways, when she. This weekend, there's no school, obviously on the weekend, and she was like, upset that she wasn't going to school. It's like a no win. Like, at first she was upset that she was going to school, and now all she wanted to do is go to school. And we couldn't go to school on the weekend. So. Yeah, so that happened. I'm going to throw one more thing in, into a parent corner. It's about my dog. So my dog got really sick a couple weeks ago.

There was actually blood in his stool. We came home from being out one day and he had pooped all over the house and there's blood everywhere. And we're like, totally freaking out. And we took him to the er. He did his thing and they kind of got everything back in order there.

But the Bill was sent $7,000 for them to do everything that they needed to do. Now, I don't know if any of you guys have pets out there. I'm sure some of you do. When we first got Oliver, we got pet insurance for him. We got it through Healthy Paws was the company that we got it through, and we were paying like 37amonth for pet insurance. They just doubled the premium, actually, which is kind of annoying. It's like almost $70 now. A month for it. It's kind of ridiculous, but thank God we had pet insurance because we basically get 90% of that bill covered through this insurance. And since we got it for him when he was so young, there's like no pre existing conditions or anything. And so basically anything that happens, they cover 90% of the vet bill. We've had to do this one other time with him where he ate something he wasn't supposed to. He kind of swallowed like a big stick or something, and it caused kind of a similar problem. He had to go to the ER again. How to get it handled that time. It was like 4 or 5,000 bucks or something. And all of that, like, 90% of that got paid for, right? So, guys, if you have a pet and you don't have pet insurance and everything's been good so far, honestly, like, I cannot recommend pet insurance enough, all right? Because, I mean, between these two instances, it would have cost us like, what, close to $12,000 in vet bills for him. Instead, we're paying only 10% of that. So we pay basically $1,200 plus whatever our annual, you know, you know, premiums are on that. Up until this last year, it's $37 a month times 10 is 370, plus another 74 is 474. No, 374. 74. $444 a year, and he's five. So 400 times five is 2000, basically, let's call it 2000. And then we paid another 1200. So we've paid $3,200 out of pocket instead of paying $12,000 out of pocket. Right, because he's had two different issues. A completely healthy dog with random things that have happened. Okay? So I cannot. I cannot recommend pet insurance enough. And that is my little corner of parenting. All right, guys, hope you have a good one. Hope you enjoyed today's episode. We will talk to you next time. Oh, real quick. I'm actually going out of town on vacation this week. I do have a couple episodes banked where I did some really cool interviews with some awesome people. So I think I'll probably release another one of those out maybe this week. I don't know. I got to try to figure out the schedule, but I'm going to try to get something else out for you guys while I am on vacation. At least one or two more things during that time period. Until then, hope you guys have a great one. Today is Monday, so happy Monday, everyone, and we will talk to you later.

So that's it for today's show. Everyone, thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment and subscribe and give a rating wherever you get your podcasts. It'll help spread the word to those who really need it the most.